london

CGP Grey explains that the City of London is a tiny, separate entity with its own governance, history and privileges, distinct from the city called London. He covers its financial role and how it is run.

Part one of a 1996 BBC Modern Times documentary on the training to become a London black cab driver. It follows candidates learning the Knowledge and facing stressful repeated exams with Public Carriage Office examiners.

Tom Scott races a London black-cab driver who has memorized The Knowledge against a phone GPS across the city, comparing local expertise to navigation software.

Tom Scott and Matt Parker investigate some of the small deceptions and oddities of the London Underground, such as misleading signage and map distortions.

Linguist Simon Roper reconstructs how a London accent would have sounded from the 14th to the 21st centuries, reading passages in period pronunciation. It draws on the Cambridge History of the English Language.

Mike Hearn's talk at the 2012 London Bitcoin Conference on the future of Bitcoin, new applications and rebuilding the banking system. He covers lesser-known protocol features such as contracts, escrow and scripting.

Actress Claudia Christian tells how she overcame alcoholism using the Sinclair Method, which uses naltrexone to gradually reduce cravings. She discusses fresh perspectives on treating alcohol use disorder.

12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.

CGP Grey explains the City of London's unusual governance, including the Lord Mayor, guilds, and how it differs from the rest of London.

A 39-minute BBC documentary, built from earlier British Transport Films footage, on how the London Underground's Victoria Line was dug in the 1960s.

Geoff Marshall explains a running gag about London Underground stair signs claiming that the climb equals 15 floors, regardless of how many steps there actually are.

A two-minute video of an athlete sprinting against a London Underground Circle Line train between Mansion House and Cannon Street. It shows a runner keeping pace with and beating the train.

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

Not Just Bikes looks at the cancelled plan to spend over $200 million widening Wonderland Road, a stroad in his hometown of London, Ontario. He asks whether the cancellation marks a turning point away from car-dependent development.

Map Men's Jay Foreman tells the story of how the London Tube map nearly looked very different, including Harry Beck's design and TfL's initial rejection of it. A short, witty history of a design icon.

A London Haskell talk on the algebra of algebraic data types, showing how sum and product types behave like arithmetic. It frames types as numbers obeying algebraic laws.

A 1975 live demonstration of the APL language by Imperial College professor Bob Spence, showing a REPL on a modified typewriter terminal and APL's appeal to non-programmers.

Matt Parker's LMS popular lecture on how seemingly incredible results can be meaningless random patterns. He ranges from ancient Woolworths civilisations to shoelaces and DNA.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

Martin Kleppmann's QCon London 2018 talk on keeping data consistent in distributed systems without a central leader. It surveys CRDT algorithms for syncing devices and collaborative editing over peer-to-peer networks.

Animated adaptation of Tim Minchin's beat poem 'Storm', in which he argues with a hippie at a London dinner party. It satirizes alternative medicine and defends science and reason.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Michael Bryzek of Flow gives a QCon London 2018 talk on key decisions for building maintainable microservices. It covers infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming and language choice.

Not Just Bikes argues that North American transit struggles to attract riders because of the land use around it, not the transit itself. It uses examples such as a London, Ontario line with unreachable stations.

VICE's Oobah Butler spends eight months using fake reviews to push a nonexistent restaurant, The Shed at Dulwich, to number one on TripAdvisor in London. The short documentary shows how easily review systems can be gamed.

Steven Johnson's TED talk argues that good ideas come from connected, slow-building hunches and liquid networks, from London coffee houses to Darwin to the modern web, rather than lone Eureka moments.

Tom Scott's Ignite London talk about a flash mob that went very wrong.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

A QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

Ben Crystal performs Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' in Original Pronunciation, the reconstructed accent of Shakespeare's time, on a London balcony.